SEO is often described as a combination of art and
science. Indeed, explaining SEO methodologies to clients and laypeople can be a daunting task.

There are so many specific, drill-down details that it quickly gets confusing and overwhelming. Still, it’s not difficult for most dedicated SEO specialists to boil down the key elements of SEO into three relatively straightforward variables – content, links and site optimization.

There are numerous articles online and off about all three of these elements, and this can make it easy to focus on only one or two of the three. Since all three are critical to achieving a high position on search engines, it is important to
take a step back and understand how they work together to help your website rank well.

Let’s look at content first

The most important of the three, and in my opinion the most ignored, is
content. Your website should start with your content and not with optimization
and links. It’s easy to forget this. Websites that contain a handful of pages
with little meaningful content, but lots of keyword repetition and link text
abound. Likewise, e-commerce and other commercial sites that contain nothing
but lists of products and/or services with “Buy Now” buttons are not as
effective in terms of converting leads to sales as sites that provide detailed
product descriptions, customer reviews, editorial articles and information and
other juicy content. Websites that contain complementary information are
favored by search engines because they are thematically relevant and are likely
to be updated regularly.

I have seen many websites that contain a fair number of backlinks and
on-page optimization, but very little actual content. Financial sites are a
great example of this. For example, a site that sells mortgage loans may have
five different pages with applications and/or contact forms which collect an
individual’s information. These types of sites focus on lead generation. They
want you to fill out something so they can get back to you with a phone
call. Sparse information about the types of loans available is often provided,
in addition to rate information, company information, calculators and perhaps a
FAQ. Sites like these are missing a valuable opportunity to differentiate
themselves in an extremely competitive environment.

A site that takes the time to provide detailed information about its area of
expertise in the form of articles, current news stories, editorials and
“how-to” guides or tips will not only differentiate itself from sites with
little content, but also start ranking well in search engines for keywords
contained in all that content. Content helps with conversion too. After all,
from which site would you rather buy?

Adding content to your website seems like such a simple solution to me, but
I often meet with resistance when I suggest it. That’s because it’s not always
easy to update your website. You can start small by adding an “articles” or
“information” page and linking to it on the home page and the site map without
integrating it into the main navigation. It’s much easier to update one page
than an entire site. Your articles page could contain links to all your
articles, with each link accompanied by a short description of the article.
Each article would reside on its own page. If you wrote one article a week,
you’d quickly build up a nice collection of articles that could serve as a
great resource in your industry (be it financial or otherwise), while also
expanding the size of your site and providing regular fodder for site updates.

Optimization is the icing on the cake

Once you have a plan in place for creating meaningful, regularly updated
content for your website, optimization will fall natural into place. Each new
page of content provides you with the opportunity to further optimize your
site. On-page optimization of the Meta, Title and ALT
tags and modified text should be customized to match the text for each new page
of content. If there is a specific term you want to target, you can create an
article around that term (e.g., an article about rising “interest rates” could
be written for a site selling “mortgage loans.”)

Updating your site on a regular basis with new articles which are likewise
optimized for search engines eliminates the need to rework and reoptimize
existing pages which may or may not contain relevant text supporting the terms
you want to target. So while you are spending more time writing more content,
you’ll be spending less time trying to figure out how to change the content and
layout of your keywords to get a better ranking.

Pages are appropriately optimized when they match the subject matter on the
page and not when they target random keywords which have no content to support
them. Simply optimizing pages based on what words you want to target is only
one piece of the puzzle. You’re on the right track if you start with content,
then move to optimization only after the relevant content has been created. The
final step is link placement, but even that must be relevant and content-driven.

Link Placement

I will not restate the how and why of link placement since there are a
gazillion articles about it. However, it is important to mention “link
placement,” a.k.a. “reciprocal linking,” when discussing the big picture. The
reality for website owners in this day and age is that great content and superb
optimization just isn’t enough for optimal positioning in Google, which is the
#1 search site in the U.S.
You need people to link back to you, and these links must be meaningful. I mention
Google specifically because Yahoo and MSN (the other major search players)
still seem to favor on-page optimization more than link placement. This,
however, is changing.

Contrary to popular belief (and practice), link placement does not exist in
a vacuum. You want sites that have a high PR and/or many backlinks to link to
your website. The best sites contain quality content and are leaders in their
particular vertical. They are updated regularly and have a generous amount of
dedicated customers and industry partners linking to them. So why should they
link to you?

It all comes back to content. If you are providing meaningful, relevant
content which is updated regularly, you are more likely to get great sites
to link to you. As a website owner, I would rather link to industry thought
leaders and valuable resources than five-page sites that contain nothing but
online forms or 100-page sites that contain nothing but product thumbnails and
“Buy Now” buttons. You have to give a lot to get a little in this business.

So content, optimization, links –- is it really that simple? If so, why
are SEOs charging so much? Why can’t they guarantee that your site will rank
well in the search results? What, after all, are you paying for? Let’s break
down these questions.

Is it really that simple?

Yes, it is. The simple formula for a great ranking is to provide lots of
content which is expertly optimized and get great backlinks to boot. What’s not
so simple is actually developing the content and updating your site. This is
where many website and business owners balk. It takes time to develop content,
review it, edit it and upload it. It takes even more time to redesign a website
that is scalable enough to accommodate regular updates (there are some great
content management tools to help with this, but that’s for another article).

If your core business model involves selling cars, for example, then it is
very difficult to think in terms of providing online resources (in the form of
articles, white papers and FAQs) to potential clients. You want to sell cars,
period. However, if you provide articles about the importance of oil changes,
how to change a tire or the benefits of premium gas over regular unleaded, then
you begin to differentiate yourself from all the other car dealers out there.

Chances are you have at least once employee who is a halfway decent writer,
too. Pull on your resources and get the guy or gal to write one or two articles
a month for your website. It may take a few months to start seeing where this
pays off. But, eventually, it will pay off as your site begins to show up in
the search results for thematically relevant terms that probably never even
occurred to you to target in the first place.

Why are SEOs charging so much?

The short answer is that on-page optimization is extremely important, and
knowing how to do it is a unique skill. Although I personally don’t recommend
optimizing pages without also devising a comprehensive content update strategy,
it can’t be argued that your entire site is better off if it is optimized. SEOs
spend a lot of time following industry trends and doing actual hands-on
optimization. We know how to optimize a page so that it is search engine
friendly, without being spammy. Many of us can also generate search-engine
friendly content that follows the tone of your site naturally. This is a
skill acquired from long hours of writing highly-optimized sentences for a wide
variety of clients.

Proper optimization of existing pages is very time consuming. You’re paying
for the expertise of the SEO and the actual service itself. A good SEO will
review your competitors’ websites, thoroughly evaluate your site and provide
you with a concrete plan on what, how and where to implement changes to your
site. You’re paying for this service, not for the results, and it is a service
you have chosen to implement.

So why won’t SEO’s guarantee results?

SEOs are very hesitant to guarantee concrete results (e.g., you will be
in the #5 position in Google for yourkeyword.com by May 21st). The
main reason for this is that we don’t work for Google or Yahoo or MSN. We work
for our clients and base our strategies on past campaigns and successes. While
I cannot guarantee what position your site will be in for a specific keyword or
keywords, I can almost certainly guarantee that traffic will increase to your
website once it is optimized.

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